Bernadette Greevy was as demanding of others as she was of herself, writes Michael Dervan
MEZZO-SOPRANO Bernadette Greevy managed for more than four decades to be the Irish female concert, opera and oratorio singer that every music lover in the country had heard of. That was in spite of beginning her career at the bottom of the female range, as a fully-blown contralto.
She had, to put it mildly, a remarkable voice. It had the kind of colouring you don't forget, dark and full, and was produced both with apparent ease and unflinching sincerity. It could reach higher than you might at first have thought it capable of, and it didn't struggle to do so.
It was a voice of remarkable longevity that hardly seemed to show the passing of the years any more than its owner did.
"I'm interested in the preservation of my voice," she told me once. "I have been given a wonderful instrument. I saw so many voices totally wrecked by people being involved in screaming operas out before they knew how to sing."
The secret of the appearance is easier to fathom. She worked in London and Dublin for Elizabeth Arden to support herself before her international career took off.
At home that career took off pretty quickly. Appearances in amateur musical society productions of The Lily of Killarneyand Maritanawere quickly followed by her professional opera début as Maddalena in Verdi's Rigolettofor the Dublin Grand Opera Society in April 1961. She appeared in Mascagni's L'amico Fritzalongside Veronica Dunne at the Wexford Festival in 1962.
The opera stage was never to become her domain though. She failed to acquire the necessary skills to support her acting the things she could so perceptively convey with her voice.
In the 1960s, when she was still in her 20s, she worked on Mahler with Hungarian Tibor Paul (who was then both director of music at RTÉ as well as principal conductor of the RTÉ Symphony Orchestra) and was taken under the wing of the great conductor John Barbirolli, who, as she put it, also taught her Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, the Verdi Requiemand Handel's Messiah.
She was soon working in the recording studio. She recorded Haydn's Theresienmesseunder George Guest and Handel arias with the Academy of St Martin in the Fields under Neville Marriner.
Some of the aria recordings have appeared in so many anthologies that they have hardly been out of the catalogue since.
"I got more work in my life from that Handel recording than I've got from anything else," she said.
It was not until the 1980s (with János Fürst) and 1990s (with Franz-Paul Decker) that her celebrated Mahler performances came out on disc.
Anyone wanting to hear what the youthful Greevy sounded like in this repertoire will have to chase down a bootleg CD of a 1967 Proms appearance in the Kindertotenliedercycle with the London Symphony Orchestra under Claudio Abbado.
Other notable recordings include Bach conducted by John Beckett (the only readily available recording marking the famous Bach cantata series that Beckett promoted in the 1970s) and Seóirse Bodley's song-cycle A Girl, setting poems by Brendan Kennelly in a style that blended the worlds of sean-nós singing and contemporary music.
She was proud that she ran her international career from Dublin at a time when that was regarded as professional suicide.
She was often seen as having a chip on her shoulder, and was not always wise in her public griping.
In person and in private her company was charming and humorous, her intelligence was quick and she was fully capable of being self-deprecating in ways her public persona would not have suggested.
In matters musical she was earnest and could be as highly demanding of others as she was of herself. She was headstrong, often battling where others would have wilted. In the Ireland of the 1960s, she found a lot to battle against.
Had she been born into a later age, with her gumption and voice, she could surely have had the world at her feet.